Poetry by Pablo Neruda

Recording by Miranda Richardson for the Lyrics and Poetry Soundtrack of Il Postino.


Poetry
by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

This poem is a simple but very powerful description of how poetry captures a poet, how it suddenly arrives without warning, and gives meaning and beauty to everything.

Mikael de Lara Co: Don Carlos Palanca Awardee for Poetry

The horizon, my ancestors say,
is an eye. When it shuts
its lashes sift the sea for rafts

and turn fishermen and divers to stone,
their hands still clenched around pearls,
their blood turning crystalline and cold.

The gods were in love with the horizon.
They hung their jewels
on the night-sky and ebbed into the eye
while my people stared
at the orphaned trinkets.

The poem above is an excerpt from the the poem Archipelago by Mikael "Kael" de Lara Co. It is part of his award-winning collection "Hands for a Fistful of Sand." Other poems in the collection are Silence and Cryptic.

Hands for a Fistful of Sand won for Kael the First Prize for Poetry for this year's Don Carlos Palance Memorial Awards for Literature.

Kael was my classmate at AdMU. He was a BS Environmental Science major, but everybody knew his heart was in literature, in creatively tying up simple words and making them mean so much more.

This award is proof of his infinite genius. I believe he is going to be one of the poets of our generation who will define for us what Filipino poetry is in the second millennium.

Congratulations Kael!!!

Jose Garcia Villa's I CAN NO MORE HEAR LOVE'S

I can no more hear Love's
Voice. No more moves
The mouth of her. Birds
No more sing. Words
I speak return lonely.
Flowers I pick turn ghostly.
Fire that I burn glows
Pale. No more blows
The wind. Time tells
No more truth. Bells
Ring no more in me.
I am all alone singly.
Lonely rests my head.
—— O my God! I am dead.

Robert Frost's Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.